Travel. Read. Travel. Read. Travel. Read. And So Sad Today by the Melissa Broder and Slow Days, Fast Company - The World, The Flesh, and L.A. by Eve Babitz. Also, Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones - "The Long Night." Let me explain. I was not on any epic journey, I was in and out of Boston and Vermont for work and Boston and New York for family, riding planes, driving cars, taking trains and shuttles, though no dragons or spaceships, nothing interstellar. But I was going, going, going, and reading, reading, reading, and then consuming Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones - "The Long Night" and somewhere along the way I thought, there will be some kind of narrative here, that all of this media would form some sort of larger arc. That it would all hang together and say something about life, and all the pain in the world, and if not answering any larger questions about my place in the universe, certainly something about my life in some small and possily significant way. And really, at the end of the day, when one is considering the big, unanswered questions isn't the opportunity for some inreased personal insights and enhanced self-awareness enough? I think so. Which leaves us where exactly? It leaves me thinking about art, how we make and live it and how when it's good, it can really fuck with us, pulling on our emotions, making us laugh and cry, inducing stress and anticipation and leaving us breathless, when not actually questioning our very own life decisions. Which is yeah, a lot of feels, and just a lot to muse on, which is to say, feeling things is pretty good, whatever the feels are, experiencing emotions, intensely, and if Endgame brought me to tears and "The Long Night" to elation, despite the lighting, So Sad Today and The World, The Flesh, and L.A. were something else entirely, as books, for me, tend to be, more visceral and physical, more like appendages.

So Sad Today is not a complete surprise to me, I know Broder's Twitter feed of the same name, though did not appreciate its importance to Broder until I read this book, and I know her from the OTHERPPLE podcast, and she's a delightful, intelligent presence, who has it amazingly together publicly given the suffering she has experienced. And that's not a criticism, it's how so many of us operate, managing ourselves out in the world, keeping it together and then allowing the venom, fear, raunch and raw nerves of it all to ooze across the page. Broder is living lives on top of lives and she brings it to her work and I fucking applaud that. But than there is Babitz. Is it too much say this is one of my most favorite recent reads? I don't think so. Still, am I inherently biased towards essays, Los Angeles, sex, celebrities and whatever it means to be an artist all of the time, but especially in Southern California, and at least somewhat in the 1960s and 70s? Please, its everything to me. But that wouldn't be enough to love it like I did. It's reminiscent of Didion, and I can't imagine the comparisons are avoidable, but the work is so lived-in and louche, though most importantly, all about making art, when not taking drugs and having sex, socializing and gossiping. What's interesting to me is how little Babitz talks about the struggle of making art, unlike Patti Smith in Just Kids, which is all about all of that and the struggle too. Babitz doesn't seem to struggle, she just is, and if that's not exactly true, than it's clearly the fantasy I'm also drawn to. That one can just be one with the world. And it's hard to imagine wanting anything more than that. And so yes, Endgame and "The Long Night" are fantasy as well, and they speak to me. They are also escapist and I'll always embrace that. But they don't touch me, not like Babitz, not when the sentences are so languid, dripping as they do into a larger narrative of a kind of life that one, me, might aspire to, if one were on a different path and could live and write as she does. Might I revisit Broder here for a moment now, too? I might, because she too has tapped into something, and just as much sex and drugs from what I can see, but she also lifts the lid on the pain, and I imagine I need to ask myself if I'm in a place to handle real pain these days, because changing lives aside, I'm not so sure I am.